BETTER CHANGE
Getting the right people on the bus to get the job done
Better Change founder, Victoria Reed, reminds us of what the organisation hopes to achieve and who the people driving the initiative are.
I 30 NOVEMBER 2023
n my previous articles I have given my insight into some of the big issues that affect us working in the gambling industry. Some issues are closer to home than others and sometimes as in this case the eye of the storm sits directly on top of us. When I founded Better Change back
in 2020 it was because I wanted to make an actual difference. I saw a huge gap between the safer gambling strategies of the operators and the customer experience, it was a gap which I felt needed to close if the operator was to build a great business. Too often I would see great initiatives kyboshed because they were either detrimental to the bottom line of the organisation or, they would go unnecessarily over and above what was required to be compliant, diverting resources that could be spent on marketing and customer acquisition instead. I felt strongly that this had to change if the industry was to thrive in the current climate, so I set up Better Change to support the industry in promoting positive play. Given my experience I knew that I would have to demonstrate to the industry that being pro-active with safer gambling was good for business. That by giving people choices when it comes to how they gamble safely would be more effective than dictating to them by imposing limits and restrictive measures to limit the way they currently play and, that by understanding the way people play through the knowledge and experience of people who enjoy gambling safely we could facilitate that. Sounds straight forward enough, right? Well, not quite! I am a
big fan of the book “good to great” by Jim Collins. If you haven’t read it, I can highly recommend it; instead of being a self- promoting autobiography of someone who did well, it is a study into a cohort of businesses who have made the transition from
good to great and what similarities there are between them. One of the big lessons I learnt from this book is to get the right people on the bus so that is where I started. Having secured investment from a like-minded organisation who shared Better Change’s vision so that I could buy a bus, I looked to recruit some non-executive directors to help me drive it to where we wanted to go. As this was an organisation focussed on positive play we needed some industry experts from igaming, land-based gambling and compliance. For the latter I was delighted to bring on board compliance expert Erica Young who has extensive experience as a regulator working with the UK Gambling Commission and as a Personal Management Licence (PML) holder. However, to ensure that Better Change was sustainable as an organisation preventing gambling harm, we would need access to the voluntary industry contributions to fund the research, education, prevention and treatment (RET) of gambling harm and this is where the issues began. In the UK since 2019 it has been a requirement of any
organisation in the UK seeking funding through RET contributions to apply to the Gambling Commission to be put on a list of approved recipients. Better Change submitted their application confi dent that they had everything in place with a strong governance structure within the organisation, bringing together expertise from across the gambling industry along with knowledge of gambling harm and lived experience. Unfortunately, we were refused entry onto the RET list as the gambling commission did not approve of having people with direct involvement with operators on the list. Whilst I can understand this decision from a position of wanting to put distance between operators and those organisations which
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